I’m OK with this. Actual driving behaviour is a great predictor of the risk that the driver will cause a collision. Without that data, insurers have to resort to demographic generalisations - how old are you, what gender, what career, which district you live in &c to calculate premiums and that can be uncomfortably…

Everybody in the UK mocks the West Midlands accent, but I secretly quite like it. Almost lyrical.

Tariffs hurt consumers, and prop up inefficient businesses. Importers trying to avoid tariffs (to provide what consumers want) will always try clever workarounds, which means a little bit of waste and misallocation. Always.

This aspect of consumer rights in the USA really baffles me. Why is the price tag on a car (or a snack or an insurance policy or whatever) not the same as what the customer actually has to pay? Price opacity is bad for consumers, bad for the better businesses, and only provides an advantage for the bad businesses.

It’s old. And even in its prime it was hard to live with, weak, and disappointing. A perfect match!

He said the captain accelerated when the ship’s response was too slow.

You and I would agree, but an Egyptian court wouldn’t, as Egyptian law ensures that the Egyptian pilots have minimal liability.

Everybody’s saying it’s racist, and that’s true, but this happens on every border around the world. Smuggling has always been about risk-management, and the border officials will always be more suspicious of a foreigner than they will be of a native with an easy smile. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Mexico or Morocco or…

Useful life of Mercedes truck engines and ZF gearboxes is quite long; but if that was a genuine concern, you could replace both, and still have a platform that costs 1/20 of the (also used) RV in the OP. That’s a lot of money in your wallet for a conversion made just how you like...

Those tiny little subfloor cabins are common in tourist coaches, in some markets, so the driver can sleep in a cheap and convenient (but not luxurious) little box, whilst the tourists are in their hotel.

What do you want flashers to achieve?

Lots of interior space but a small footprint, 4wd, manual, supercharged, cheap to run, reliable. This is everything that a modern car should be. Where did humanity go so wrong?

I’m tired of Oscar Isaac doing these kinds of roles. He is an amazing actor. He could be a great. I actually thought that he was going to be this generation’s Al Pacino but he keeps taking these (I assume, high paying) roles in franchises that use none of his talents.

Those stickers might have gone out of fashion 10 years ago in the USA, but you can still see this on 50% of all cars in France:

You wouldn’t need transponders if you had basic OCR and a competently-managed database of vehicle registrations. Lots of other toll roads (and inner-city charging zones) in other parts of the world work fine without transponders. The technology’s been pretty mature for a few years now.

A car made out of random parts they had lying around the factory?

The problem is that people want to read public-health guidance in strict black-and-white terms, but most of the measures we want the public to take are incremental, shades of grey. If you tell people to walk 5000 metres each day to stay healthy, some folk will feel smug that they do the bare minimum and are…

In 2009, deep in a financial crunch, my local dealer offered “Buy one, get one free” on Dodge Calibers.

What’s the point of a boat that doesn’t roll? If you want to look at the water and not spill your drink, sit on the beach. Or if you like buying kit, get an enormous catamaran or something.